CertiVox’s Board of Directors includes significant expertise from the information security industry, bringing together a wealth of combined experience in technology organizations – from start-up to major global public companies – that span the United States and United Kingdom.
Brian Spector CEO
Brian is co-founder of CertiVox and brings more than 20 years of experience in the information security industry. Brian began his career in cryptographic development at Silicon Valley’s first full disk encryption software company, which later became Guardian Edge and was acquired by Symantec. Brian joined McAfee, where he began his sales career in the anti-virus solutions group. He then moved to RSA Data Security, Inc., successfully forming several major strategic partnerships in the intellectual property licensing division, which included the BSAFE line of cryptographic SDKs that was responsible for the development of several standards.
Following RSA, Brian became the global business development director at nCipher (acquired by Thales in 2006), the most widely deployed hardware cryptographic security platform used by the world’s major financial institutions and governments. Most recently, Brian was General Manager of the content protection product group at Workshare, which included the Workshare Protect line of data leak prevention solutions. Brian earned a Bachelor of Science from Arizona State University.
Albert E. Sisto, Executive Chairman
Al joined CertiVox as Executive Chairman in March 2010 and brings more than 35 years of experience in the high-tech industry. He is also a Venture Partner with Nauta Capital and a General Partner of Sixth Bridge L. P., where he serves as an investor and business advisor to private companies. Al is currently Chairman of Acctuall, Inc. a SaaS financial services and analytics company and served as Chairman and CEO of Hifn (NASDAQ:HIFN) from November 2006 until its merger with Exar Corporation in April 2009, also serving on the board from 1998 to 2009. Prior to Hifn, Al had a seven year tenure as Chairman, President and CEO of Phoenix Technologies (NASDAQ:PTEC), a provider of PC and Internet platform-enabling software.
Al came to Phoenix from RSA Data Security, Inc., where he served as Chief Operating Officer, beginning in 1997. Prior to RSA, he served as President, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of DocuMagix, Inc., and has also held executive positions at PixelCraft, Inc, MIPS Technologies, Ingres, Intel and Honeywell. In addition to CertiVox and Acctuall, Al serves on the Board of Directors for Digital Signal Corporation and has served on the public Boards of inSilicon, Insignia, JetFax and Tekgraf. Al earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology.
Bruce Leith, Director
Bruce is an angel investor in technology start-ups with far-reaching experience in the software industry, bringing to CertiVox more than 35 years of general management experience with extensive international knowledge in the software and computer systems industry.
He started his career with IBM and since then has held senior management positions at Dataworks, a Nasdaq listed company; London Bridge Software, an FTSE 250 company where he served as International Managing Director; and at CodeStream, where he was CEO.
Bruce also serves as Non-Executive Director for Intellego Holdings, an Alternative Investment Market (AIM) listed digital learning company and is responsible for their mergers and acquisitions activity.
Bruce earned a Higher National Diploma (HND) in Business Studies and Computing from Twickenham College of Technology.
Dr. Sandy McKinnon, Director – Pentech Ventures
Dr. McKinnon brings to CertiVox more than 20 years experience in commercializing technology innovations, the last ten of these as a partner with Pentech Ventures.
As a freelance technical and marketing consultant early in his career, and in partnership with Scientific Generics in Cambridge, Dr. McKinnon helped develop and run their Advance Technology Group. He then served as director of Knowledge Transfer & Technology and Research Services at Heriot-Watt University, where he helped in mentoring and fund raising for twelve spin-out companies.
Experienced in protecting and licensing his and his groups’ own IP, Dr. McKinnon has provided deep technical and market due-diligence services in many sectors for a variety of blue-chip companies and venture capitalists. In addition to CertiVox, he also serves on the Board of Directors for Acunu and OmniPerception.
As a research fellow at Cambridge University, he working for six years in Nanotechnology with many of the pioneers in the field and earned a Ph.D. in Amorphous Semiconductors. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the University of Dundee.
Dr. Luke Hakes, Director – Octopus Ventures
Dr. Hakes is a principal in the ventures division of Octopus Investments and currently represents Octopus on the boards of a number of high technology start-ups in the software, semiconductor and materials industries.
After starting his career as a research scientist, he moved into management and technology consulting, where he spent a number of years helping companies improve their technology and address their performance and operational deficiencies.
Dr. Hakes holds a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and Biotechnology, a Masters in Bioinformatics and a Ph.D. in Computational Genetics – all from the University of Manchester.
